The open world may have a design paradox

What is an open-world game? This question itself is difficult to define. One way to describe it is to set several elements as evaluation criteria, such as non-linear mission design, seamless large maps, rich ecosystems, and most importantly, the above contents must be large enough. According to these standards, some open worlds may not be “open”, because many so-called open-world games may be quite weak in some of the above elements. Its ecosystem may be to make up the number, or in order to control player behavior, it weakens the non-linear mission design. You can wander around the map to accept side quests, but you will soon find that these side quests do not affect the world, and the repetitive rewards you get have no effect on you. On the contrary, the mission system of some non-open-world games (such as Baldur’s Gate 3) is even freer than many open-world games.

Baldur’s Gate 3

In my opinion, the key is whether this game “world” can make players feel that it is a complete “world” during the game. If players need to frequently load scenes from a large world to enter a dungeon, they will clearly realize that the dungeon is actually designed as an arena between players and bosses. The dungeon that needs to be loaded and entered as an arena is actually an abstraction. Characters may fight in a turn-based manner in the arena, choose cards to fight, or even roll dice to decide the outcome. Correspondingly, the original game world (generally called the large map) does not actually have such a battle scene, because the hero who saves the world cannot decide the future of the world with the devil by rolling dice. Rolling dice is just an abstraction of the battle process. The endpoint of the abstraction may be chess pieces, cards, or a more thorough pile of numbers. If the designers are strong enough, they can avoid this sense of fragmentation. The open-world design allows players to get the same combat experience as in separate dungeon scenes in non-open-world games, and then players will be more interested in this design because the world running under the same set of rules is logically beautiful and self-consistent. The open world may also be a pursuit of this self-consistency.

Can chess be an open world game?

However, the pursuit of “self-consistency” may be an illusion. What we see is that some op en-world games produced by the assembly line are often criticized for having empty worlds or too cumbersome reward designs. Players may find that after completing some key tasks, no matter how beautiful the area is, it is no longer worth exploring because there will be no valuable output here in the future. On the contrary, a very small area may be filled with densely packed identical side quests and overwhelming collection items. Experienced players will soon find that this design is often considered a sign of laziness by developers. But what if the employees of the game company are not lazy? Then you will find that the carefully designed tasks and challenges are actually just moving the things in the dungeon to the ground! The open world just merges some branch scenes into a main world, and the dungeon that could be reached by teleporting now requires riding your horse for nearly a minute to get there. Among those excellent open-world games, how many of them make you feel that the fun of this game must be brought by the open world?

The experience I most want to share comes from the phenomenon-level game Palworld in early 2024. Players can skip many early leveling steps by stealing eggs from high-level areas and hatching them. This is clearly a design oversight; the designers probably assumed players would only access high-level zones after reaching higher levels. Yet this oversight gave rise to completely different gameplay experiences as players made diverse decisions about which areas to explore. If such a design were standardized, every possible route would need to be carefully crafted. The problem, however, is that players might miss out on most of the designed content.

Palworld

This brings us back to the earlier discussion: open-world games aim to feel like complete worlds to players. But in the real world, can we experience everything the world has to offer? Obviously not. The true freedom of open worlds lies on one side of the scale, while design costs and the scope of player experience sit on the other. Balancing these two is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Nonetheless, I hope for better open-world games in the future, and if this discussion inspires readers in any way, I would be deeply honored.

Pictures:

From Steam Page of Baldur’s Gate 3

From Wikipedia of Chess

From Steam Page of Palworld

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